The Confessions of Noa Weber

by Gail Hareven

  I remember my first staged court case, it was a damages case, the show I put on in order to impress precisely the person who wasn’t there, and the paradoxical way in which his imaginary gaze helped me to relax, as if the imaginary audience of one enabled me to ignore the real one. Alek’s imagined gaze steadied my voice and my arguments, and concentrating on it distanced the lecturer and class in front of me, turning them into the spectators of a play not really intended for them.

  The whole episode of my legal studies was connected to the imagined eye of Alek, and my desire to impress him. Actually, Miriam too played a part here, a far from inconsiderable part, for from the start she urged me to study. My father offered to get me a job with one of his friends “until we see what’s happening with your life”—translation: “until you meet someone normal and marry in a normal way.” My mother said that a profession was definitely important for a woman, too, and “in my situation”—in other words, as a single parent—teaching could fit the bill, and only Miriam insisted that I had to “believe in myself,” and set up a meeting for me with the only lawyer she knew, the mother of a toddler who had attended her nursery school the year before, who she still sometimes babysat for in the afternoons.

  In those days there were not yet television series about glamorous and neurotic female lawyers, but Miriam very much admired this lawyer, who was dealing with a protracted court case about building in the yard on her behalf, and she made up her mind that law was the profession for me and nothing else would do. For months she kept at me: “You’ve got a head on your shoulders,” and “You know how to talk,” and “You were lucky to go to high school, don’t waste your luck,” and for months I kept at my parents to agree and for the assistance they were unwilling to provide—“A plan, Noaleh, must first of all be realistic”—until Aunt Greta arrived and contributed her share and compelled my father to contribute his. In all this time Miriam kept on at me, but what really decided the issue was the thought of Alek.

  For almost a year I worked in a little soup restaurant that catered mainly to art students. It was relatively pleasant work, in a relatively pleasant place. The owner of the establishment, Tami, is a friend of mine to this day. And nevertheless when I served the customers, some of whom I recognized from Alek’s social evenings, and most of whom did not recognize me, I began to feel like Cinderella. As is usual with students, they worked at all kinds of odd jobs, but according to their definition and also their self-perception, they were something else: the future of Israeli academia, the future of the local avant-garde, activists in all kinds of left-wing and protest movements; even Tami was studying part time for a degree in economics. Only I was a real waitress. A mother, waitress, and a vegetable peeler. Sometimes I would imagine Alek coming into the restaurant and sitting down next to the window with some female intellectual, and then the humiliation was insufferable. So that after a few months of peeling carrots and wiping tables, I was determined to “make something” of myself, and when Miriam continued to insist that “something” meant lawyer, I decided to think so, too.

  My idea of the profession was of course absurd: a combination of Robin Hood and Clarence Darrow, doing justice and solving all Miriam Marie’s problems with the municipality. Two days after the beginning of the academic year I realized how grotesque this image was. But without an alternative direction, I continued to study law.

  Sometimes during interviews I feel a kamikazi urge to crash into the truth. The bit about Clarence Darrow and social justice sounds good, even charming, I’ve used it a number of times, but I take good care to censor all the rest.

  Interviewer: So how did it happen that you went to study law?

  Feminist writer: It was a coincidence. With women, you know, things happen by chance. There was a man I wanted to impress.

  Interviewer: Did you want him to fall in love with you?

  Feminist writer: I knew I didn’t have a hope.

  Interviewer: But surely he must have been impressed.…

  Writer: He didn’t even know I was studying. You see, he wasn’t in the country at all, there was no contact between us. I just imagined that he was looking at me all the time.

  Interviewer: And afterwards?

  Writer: What afterwards? There is no afterwards. There is no earlier and later in love. When he felt like summoning me, I went to be his mistress. That’s the way it still is.

  What’s missing in this confession is the benefit I derived from his imaginary gaze. Apart from the intense color of the world, apart from the sharpening of senses that comes with love, apart from the increased energy, there was also a specific benefit, a lot of specific benefits: what I described before as “holding my head high.” Under Alek’s imaginary gaze I couldn’t be a floor rag. And so in some strange way his gaze helped me push the baby carriage nobly up Tiberias Street when a heat wave had already pushed me out of the house, and helped me drag myself out of bed in the dark to light the kerosene stove in the kitchen and summarize “The Development of the Concept of Good Faith in German Law.”

  The funny thing about it is that Alek, to the best of my knowledge, doesn’t give a damn about the way I or any other woman looks when she pushes a baby carriage, and studiousness was never one of his qualities. And nevertheless I mobilized his gaze in order to brush my teeth, dress properly, get onto the bus, photocopy legal precedents and understand what exactly Reuben and Simeon had done to Levi.

  “NOT THE LOVELORN MAIDEN”

  In the winter when we were still living together I found a copy of Eugene Onegin in a second-hand book store, and on good days I amused Alek by learning whole stanzas off it by heart, to which he would respond by quoting from the poem in Russian. Pushkin in his eyes was the prince of princes; the “poet of the golden age” was beyond any criticism or irony, which gave the poem such magical status in my eyes that in his absence I would read passages from it to myself out loud. The symbolists he was working on had not been translated into Hebrew—or if they had I never succeeded in finding the translations—and Dostoevsky he hated, so I was left with Onegin, who I saw as a key. Another way of touching Alek.

  From reading it so many times I absorbed the story into myself to such an extent that when I fantasized about the return of my man, I imagined the scene in the words of the poet. When he returned I would be someone impossible to ignore. When he returned, a new Noa Weber would be revealed to his eyes. “Not the plain, timorous, dejected / and lovelorn maiden whom he’d known” but Noa Weber, a duchess who not only “never shivered, / paled, flushed, or lost composure’s grip—/ no, even her eyebrow never quivered, / she never even bit her lip.”

  Even at the height of my fantasy I never deluded myself that in the light of my new incarnation my Onegin would suddenly fall in love with me. But when I sat poring over “Constitutional Law” at night, and when I stood up in my first staged trial to defend Levi against Reuben and Simeon, and when I walked into my literary editor’s office for the first time to talk about the manuscript of Blood Money—vulnerable and nervous as a child of eight on my first day at the town school—I mobilized his imaginary gaze, I sensed his imaginary eyes on me and heard his imaginary words: “could it be she … or had he dreamed? / the girl he’d scorned in what he deemed the modesty of her condition, / could it be she, who had just turned / away, so cool, so unconcerned?” And upon my word it made me noble. In my eyes at least.

  The motif of the late return it’s called: when she languishes in love, he is indifferent or amused. And when he languishes in love, she no longer responds. In non-literary reality I don’t know of a single case where this trick worked. Later on I did make a number of genuine attempts not to respond, but in those first years all my Duchess fantasies were directed towards a very different end than that of Eugene Onegin. I wanted to meet him “cool and unconcerned” only so that he would strip me of my false indifference. I wanted not to flush and pale only in order for him to make me flush and pale again. It’s true that I wanted him to admire my small and grea
t triumphs, but it’s also true that in my imagination I saw the lawyer’s gown as one more garment that he could strip me of.

  NIRA WOOLF

  “Female lawyers are sexy,” says Dr. Miles to Nira Woolf as he accompanies her on the courthouse steps, “I like strong women.” “Forget it,” replies my heroine. “Forget what?” asks the charming doctor. “Forget what’s in your head. I’m not interested in egos that want to lay feminist lawyers,” and neither of course in idiots who have no respect for a woman’s achievements, but this Nira Woolf doesn’t say.

  In this world there is no Noa Weber who did not go to Usha Street on the second of July 1972 so that I have no control group for myself. Perhaps even without Alek the drive to achieve would have appeared in me, I don’t know, but what’s certain is that the initial urge was connected to Alek. To the desire to awaken his admiration and the desire to please him. In other words, it wasn’t some nobody who was in love with him, and it wasn’t with some nobody that he went to the Rabbinate, but with someone who was somebody. Someone whose love was a credit to him, because it was only with him that she turned into a floor rag.

  Blood Money, the first in my Nira Woolf series, came out in 1982, and from then on the straightening of my spineless back proceeded at a considerable pace. But I’m putting the cart before the horse again, because in the summer of ’73 the era of holding my head high was far in the future, and I was still busy with the emergency patching up of Noa Weber, who cried a lot then; she cried day and night without any shame. I was only ashamed with Miriam, but Miriam retreated before my mother, telling me tactfully that I was welcome to visit her with the baby whenever I wanted to. My crying was real, my helplessness was not a total lie, and nevertheless there was an element of bribery in it. As if I was buying myself time with hysterical behaviour.

  I remember how underneath the hysteria I imagined myself coming out cold and sober on the other side, and at the height of my depression, weeping between the starched sheets, I knew very well what I was doing, and what was happening inside me and around me. In the time that I bought with my weakness I allowed myself to indulge in all kinds of wild schemes. I would slip out of the house, take a taxi at dawn to the airport, and just as I was, without luggage or money, get on a plane to Heidelberg. I would join the foreign service or the Mossad, and they would send me to Heidelberg. I would get out of bed, go somewhere or other, and then I would walk and walk and walk until I fell. A small item in the newspaper would say: Young Israeli woman found dead on street in Heidelberg. Or a small item in the newspaper would say: The body of a young woman was found lying in the church of the Holy Sepulchre, cause of death unknown. I had these visions, not of actual suicide, but of walking and losing myself on my way to him, losing myself until I came to his door, and then perhaps he would let me in.

  In the end of course nothing of the sort happened. My suicidal tendencies are limited, my Adele H. qualities are restricted to the realm of fantasy, and in reality there is little chance of my turning into Victor Hugo’s retarded daughter. But the fantasy of turning into someone like her did not go away as I grew older, and it still happens, too often and for too long, that I think about Alek and feel that ignominious urge to lose myself rising in my heart again.

  HAGAR

  In the weeks after giving birth to her I hardly thought about her. When they gave her to me to feed I fed her. When they handed me a soiled diaper, I dropped it into the trash. When my mother gave her a bath, I stood next to the bath, and when she put the baby in my arms I held her. I didn’t deny her, I wanted her to exist, and at the same time her presence seemed to me like a temporary matter. As if sometime someone would come to take her, and then I would be able to devote myself entirely to the one who wasn’t there.

  Maternal love, they say, is a part of nature. From the moment you lay eyes on your baby the instinctual programming begins to operate, and the feedback with the cub gives rise to infinite devotion and inevitable tenderness in you.

  I love Hagar. She makes me happy, she even makes me proud. With time I developed the devotion, the tenderness, the pleasure and so on and so forth, so that even in her absence she occupies my thoughts. If I were put to the test, to the best of my knowledge I would say: My life for hers. But such theoretical tests are not necessarily proof of love.

  In reality, I raised her and took care of her to the best of my ability, with all the unavoidable mistakes of a too young and very busy mother, mistakes that do not necessarily stem from coldness.

  What I’m trying to say with all this beating around the bush is that I didn’t fall in love with my daughter in the same way as I fell in love with her father, and I never had the same stunned sense that the feeling was inevitable with her as I had in relation to him. I learned to do the things that a mother has to do, and as I did them the feeling developed, and this is the reason why it is precisely maternal love that seems to me a matter of choice. I never chose to love Alek.

  When she was a little girl Hagar said to me more than once: “When I grow up I’ll only have children when I love someone and marry him,” and now too, as far as I know, she keeps to this decision. Sometimes I think that it’s my daughter’s good fortune that her father was not with us. Because it was only in the void that he left with his departure that I could learn to love her. I don’t think that I could ever have “grown used” to him, and it’s clear to me that his daily presence would have stopped any other presence from growing inside me.

  “Do you know what great love gave birth to Columbus?” he asked me one night in Moscow when I, at least, was quite drunk. “You don’t know because there is no such story. A great man like Columbus, something as tremendous as discovering America by mistake, is not the result of love. Love has no results.”

  “And great results don’t come from love,” I wisecracked in the treachery of drunkeness.

  “Something like that, but don’t you believe it. It’s only Symbolists’ talk. Not something really connected to life.” At this point I already knew, if I didn’t know from the outset, that the ideas he spouted were to be taken no more seriously than his retraction of them.

  The Yom Kippur War was the first time that I paid my daughter any real attention. My father put on his uniform on the first day of the war and drove to the staff headquarters to find himself a job in the chaos. My mother plunged immediately into the hospital, and hardly emerged to go home. Talush was deposited with neighbours and Miriam moved temporarily to Kiryat Yovel to help her sister-in-law who had been left alone with three small children. In September I had started work in Tami’s restaurant, Soupçon, and Hagar had started going to daycare, but with the outbreak of war both the restaurant and the daycare were closed, and with all the horror around, I no longer seemed so important even to myself.

  I once read a story in an American magazine, maybe made up, about a flood in a Scandinavian mental asylum. According to this story, when the water began rising the catatonics emerged from their paralysis, came to life and began to evacuate the building with exemplary efficiency, ingenuity, and mutual aid. All the way to their new temporary facilities, with the water still rushing behind them, they kept on making merry, sat wrapped in their blankets and sang, threw candies at each other—or so I imagine the scene—and only early in the morning, when they were taken off the truck and led into the new building, did the lunatics return to their lunacy, the catatonics to their catatonia.

  Two thousand six hundred soldiers were killed in the Yom Kippur War, Amikam among them, I already knew, and two of my peers from the youth movement, and four members of the kibbutz. Most of my classmates were at the front, Yoash was in Sinai with the reservists; almost everyone I knew plunged into the war, and the whole horror passed me by.

  All that happened to me was that I started to think about Hagar, and that too came from a primeval fear. Suddenly the two of us were alone, and with all the unclear information and rumors flying around, I started fantasizing about how I would flee with her to the forests. The fores
ts? Yes, I regret to say that for some reason I saw myself fleeing the shelling with the baby to the forest.

  Among other nonsense I thought that it was a good thing she was still breast-feeding, because when the Syrian stormtroopers ran riot in the streets—for some reason I had Syrians in my head—I would be able to lock the door without having to worry about food for her. I remember that I even checked the lock. At the end of all these adventures was of course an emotional reunion with Alek who came to look for us; but until the emotional reunion, I was at least with her both in fantasy and reality.

  Someone will have to explain to me one day why people make propaganda for love: we have our heads stuffed with it from infancy, as if this particular lunacy is an important Zionist value. Get ready, get set, here it comes … like a flash of lightning … your personal earthquake … don’t let it pass you by, you too deserve to experience it … love at first sight for every citizen!

  When I was a child it wasn’t so bad: “love” was mentioned almost only at bedtime; “love” appeared in the fairy tales that Yochi sometimes read aloud to us from the passage, when we were all already tucked into bed in our rooms, with our faces to the wall. But Yochi usually preferred stories of a different kind, and it was only rarely that she read us fairy tales.

  Later on we discovered Hollywood romances for ourselves, in the movies for adults screened in the dining room and in hidden copies of Movie World. The girls read Daddy Longlegs, the boys restricted themselves to volleyball.… On the door of a cupboard in the dentist’s clinic Rhett Butler held Scarlett O’Hara’s chin as if he were about to examine her throat, and when I opened my mouth wide Shoshana Damari sang on the radio, “He knew there was no lighthouse on the shore.…” On the whole, I think, most of the time we were free of romantic preoccupations. Not like today when the propaganda is more and more pervasive, and every click of the remote control brings you propaganda for epilepsy or some weird jingle in praise of being struck by lightning.